style manuals | Roger's rhetoric

Words into Type

Third Edition, Completely Revised

by Marjorie E. Skillin and Robert M. Gay

Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1974

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This book is a must if you are a writer or care about style and grammar.

It is far superior to The Chicago Manual of Style and much easier to use.

It is superbly organized with a fabulous index which makes everything super easy to find.

Say, you want to know whether or not to italicize the name of a ship, of the name of a TV series. Just look in the index under “ships” or “TV,” and you will find the page immediately.

This is an indispensable book that has never been superseded. As a writer and former copy editor. I can’t imagine being without it.

This is a must have book for a writer who needs a copyeditor in the form of a reference book ever reliably at hand. It is clear and comprehensive, and seems to address every sort of niggling question about capitalization, italicization, punctuation, and the like a writer might have.

The index is superb. You can find anything you want within a matter of seconds.

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Here’s an example of Words into Type coming to my rescue, from today.

I was doing a translation (from Russian into English).

Describing an interaction between Maxim Gorky and H. G. Wells, the writer used the phrase vtiraniya ochkov Uellsu : pulling the wool over [H. G.] Wells’s eyes.

In English, it is punctuated as Wells’ or Wells’s?